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Though the demands of women just now are generally urged in the order of–first, employment, then education, and lastly, the franchise, I have dealt principally with the latter, because I sincerely believe that it, and it only, will lead to their obtaining a just measure of the two former. Had I been treating of an ideal, or even a truly civilised polity, I should have spoken of education first; for education ought to be the necessary and sole qualification for the franchise. But we have not so ordered it in England in the case of men; and in all fairness we ought not to do so in the case of women. We have not so ordered it, and we had no right to order it otherwise than we have done. If we have neglected to give the masses due education, we have no right to withhold the franchise on the strength of that neglect. Like Frankenstein, we may have made our man ill: but we cannot help his being alive; and if he destroys us, it is our own fault.

If any reply, that to add a number of uneducated women-voters to the number of uneducated men-voters will be only to make the danger worse, the answer is:–That women will be always less brutal than men, and will exercise on them (unless they are maddened, as in the first French Revolution, by the hunger and misery of their children) the same softening influence in public life which they now exercise in private; and, moreover, that as things stand now, the average woman is more educated, in every sense of the word, than the average man; and that to admit women would be to admit a class of voters superior, not inferior, to the average.

Startling as this may sound to some, I assert that it is true.

We must recollect that the just complaints of the insufficient education of girls proceed almost entirely from that ‘lower-upper’ class which stocks the professions, including the Press; that this class furnishes only a small portion of the whole number of voters; that the vast majority belong (and will belong still more hereafter) to other classes, of whom we may say, that in all of them the girls are better educated than the boys. They stay longer at school–sometimes twice as long. They are more open to the purifying and elevating influences of religion. Their brains are neither muddled away with drink and profligacy, or narrowed by the one absorbing aim of turning a penny into five farthings. They have a far larger share than their brothers of that best of all practical and moral educations, that of family life. Any one who has had experience of the families of farmers and small tradesmen, knows how boorish the lads are, beside the intelligence, and often the refinement, of their sisters. The same rule holds (I am told) in the manufacturing districts. Even in the families of employers, the young ladies are, and have been for a generation or two, far more highly cultivated than their brothers, whose intellects are always early absorbed in business, and too often injured by pleasure. The same, I believe, in spite of all that has been written about the frivolity of the girl of the period, holds true of that class which is, by a strange irony, called ‘the ruling class.’ I suspect that the average young lady already learns more worth knowing at home than her brother does at the public school. Those, moreover, who complain that girls are trained now too often merely as articles for the so-called ‘marriage market,’ must remember this–that the great majority of those who will have votes will be either widows, who have long passed all that, have had experience, bitter and wholesome, of the realities of life, and have most of them given many pledges to the State in the form of children; or women who, by various circumstances, have been early withdrawn from the competition of this same marriage-market, and have settled down into pure and honourable celibacy, with full time, and generally full inclination, to cultivate and employ their own powers. I know not what society those men may have lived in who are in the habit of sneering at ‘old maids.’ My experience has led me to regard them with deep respect, from the servant retired on her little savings to the unmarried sisters of the rich and the powerful, as a class pure, unselfish, thoughtful, useful, often experienced and able; more fit for the franchise, when they are once awakened to their duties as citizens, than the average men of the corresponding class. I am aware that such a statement will be met with ‘laughter, the unripe fruit of wisdom.’ But that will not affect its truth.